Technological advancements change many aspects of our lives. Sometimes technology can have a global impact. Most of the time, when we think about world-changing technology, we aren’t talking about the planet. Maybe we should. The path to a solution for some of our climate change challenges may reside with advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI).

 Science and climate technology experienced significant advances over the last few decades. With these advances comes a massive amount of climate data. Climate scientists, meteorologists, and climatologists analyze this data to understand the impact of climate change better. They create advanced weather models and better prediction tools. However, leveraging AI and Machine Learning to aid this effort is a newer concept. 

 Some may still debate whether humans are responsible for significant changes in the global climate. However, it is hard to dispute the Earth’s changing climate. Disruptions to historical weather patterns, an uptick in dangerous weather, and melting glaciers are but a few data-proven climate changes. As a prominent Los Angeles iPhone app developer, we intimately understand the potentially devastating impact of climate change.

 No matter the side of the debate, we can leverage technology to understand climate change better and discover ways to reduce the impact of climate change.

AI and Climate Science

AI, and its subset of machine learning, have the power to analyze data and images at a speed and scale beyond human capabilities. From this analysis comes better prediction models and algorithms to detect patterns. These results help make informed decisions, find efficiencies, or solve complex problems. When applied to the challenges of climate change, AI and machine learning prove exceptionally beneficial. 

 Partnerships between data science and climate science create a new dynamic to combat climate change. Until recently, climate scientists relied on information collected from simulations and observations, which followed predetermined rules. With AI, and specifically machine learning, the data and imagery collected from around the planet feed into AI learning models. The process uses machine learning to ‘train’ algorithms using large amounts of climate-based datasets.

 Successful implementations of AI and climate change nationally include Japan and Brazil. Japan employs AI as an early warning against natural disasters. In the Amazon, AI monitors and predicts deforestation.

 When applied to climate change, advances in AI and machine learning create exciting opportunities for companies to innovate. Kayrros is one such example. They are a data analytics company that provides insight into climate risk by monitoring energy, natural resource, and industrial markets.

AI’s Use to Reduce Carbon Emissions

Of all the ways that AI could positively impact climate change, the goal of zero-carbon emissions may be the best bet. Many world governments and leaders across global economies pledged a goal of net-zero carbon emission by 2050. This pledge is a needed yet ambitious objective to bring global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to a net-zero solution.

 The energy sector will have the most significant impact on the success or failure of this goal. Electric power produces 25% of greenhouse gases worldwide. Using AI to gain efficiencies by optimizing energy grids is a short-term application that could provide immediate benefits. AI can integrate and increase the use and efficiency of renewable energy sources combined with current energy grids.

 AI solutions return immediate benefits on a slightly smaller scale. The successful application of AI to operate commercial buildings’ heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) is one such example. On average, nearly 50% of a commercial building’s energy usage comes from HVAC systems, with more than half going to waste. Large warehouses, factories, or industrial centers see significant cost savings and emissions reduction from AI-controlled HVAC operations.

Potential Diminishing Returns Using AI

The energy and carbon emissions to power AI on the scale needed could be counterintuitive. Some analysis predicts that the data centers used to power AI could consume upwards of 25% of the world’s electricity.

 However, large tech companies are aware, and some have taken steps to mitigate the impact.  Google successfully deployed AI to mitigate excessive heat loss. Partnering with DeepMind to develop an AI recommendation system, AI systems control data center cooling. The results produced a near-immediate 30% energy savings.

Conclusion

Applying AI and machine learning could be a turning point against climate change. The collaboration of data science and climate science is still in the early stages. However, the positive impact already felt by AI’s use to run the heating and cooling of commercial buildings is a reality today. 

 AI and machine learning applications focused on combating climate change that impacts the environment are a field brimming with opportunities. If you or your company have a climate-focused idea for an AI or machine learning application, Dogtown Media is your partner to develop and deploy it. Take advantage of our free consultation to see how we can partner together to positively impact the environment.

The term Metaverse exploded into the public lexicon with the rebranding of Facebook to Meta. Since then, the Metaverse has become a trending topic, the catchphrase of CES, and something of a meme. While there seems to be a common acceptance that the Metaverse is real – or will be – there are still many questions and uncertainty of what the Metaverse is, how the metaverse words, and why it’s important.

As a leading AI app developer, we’re laser-focused on staying ahead of what new technologies are coming to the market, understanding how these new technologies will influence your business and what implications these new technologies have on the app development space as a whole.

So, to deliver on staying on top of these new evolving technologies, we thought it would be useful to dig into what exactly the metaverse is, and why it’s important for you to understand this significant technological trend.

What is the Metaverse

The Metaverse may be catching on in social and tech circles, but the term goes back to 1992 when it was used in a book titled Snow Crash by author Neal Stephenson. The Metaverse in the book is described as having life-like avatars interacting with each other in a three-dimensional virtual reality world. The Metaverse of today could look and feel very similar, and there have been elements of this VR world found in modern digital experience.

 A real-world version of the Metaverse intends to combine virtual reality and augmented reality to create a digital world where real people depicted as digital avatars can interact with each other and the virtual environment. The height of the vision for the Metaverse is a place where you could work, play, explore, and travel virtually with almost anyone from almost anywhere. The bedrock of this somewhat nebulous vision is a reimagining of the internet and what it means to connect to each other digitally.

Why the Metaverse Matters

Once you get past the possibilities and appeal that the metaverse promises, it is not hard to imagine how the Metaverse can be used for commerce and profit. Microsoft and Meta are investing heavily in the Metaverse, and these companies and others have established virtual and augmented reality hardware and software already on the market.

 Buying and selling digital goods and services are far from a new concept. The video game industry is a prime example. A standard business model is for game development and publishing companies to offer their games for free, banking on the in-game purchasing of digital items and currency that change the look of a player’s character and accessories. In some cases, these digital purchases provide paid advantages over non-paying players.

 Beyond just video games, the rise in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency will have a significant stake in the economy of the Metaverse.

So, why does this matter for businesses? Well, those companies that are acting early and investing in digital experiences or apps to position around this adoption of the Metaverse, may win big if the Metaverse truly grows to become what its proponents suggest. For instance, many clients seeking an iPhone app developer in Los Angeles have reached out to inquire how they can position their app development strategy to align with this insatiable buzz of the Metaverse.

NFTs, Blockchain, and the Metaverse

Blockchain and NFTs currently exist in the digital world and are compelling alternative payment forms compared to traditional currency. Both will be a pillar of whatever the Metaverse becomes. Blockchain is the foundation that cryptocurrency is built on. A blockchain is a distributed database shared across a computer network. Because blockchains are immutable ledgers that can’t be edited or deleted, that makes them the perfect storage for cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

 Like a blockchain, or more accurately because of it, NFTs have become a very popular way to represent digital ownership on the blockchain. NFTs are heavily used in the video game industry, and a new subset of the sector is blockchain gaming. The concept allows players to turn their progress in the game into cryptocurrency through NFTs.

 As the Metaverse will rely heavily on the blockchain, it’s easy to see how cryptocurrency and NFTs will be the digital assets of choice for buying and selling in the digital world. It is not hard to imagine, for example, a new definition and direction for the traditional real estate industry.

 Instead of buying a brick-and-mortar home, a real estate agent, using a virtual avatar, will show clients a three-dimensional virtual home. The agent and the buyer – also using a virtual avatar – would complete the sale using cryptocurrency and ownership of the digital home established using NFTs. This hypothetical example sounds like a video game, but it could be real and here sooner than we think.

Moving Forward

In some ways, the Metaverse is already here, and many people engage with it daily. The future of the Metaverse, what shape it will take, and the further immersion of our real world with a fully-realized digital one, is only a few years away.

As the 2021 year comes to a close and we anticipate what’s to come in 2022, it’s with great appreciation and honor to announce that Dogtown Media has received a global accolade from the major digital rating agency, Clutch.co, as a Top Global B2B Company for 2021.

After 10 years in the mobile app space, reaching a highly regarded and recognized global accolade is a major accomplishment and points to the continued dedication of Dogtown Media to their global client base and their hyper-focus on producing high-quality applications. 

Dogtown Media is Los Angeles’ leading mobile application company, working with organizations in nearly every vertical to bring their unique ideas and solutions to the app market. Dogtown Media prides itself on the satisfaction, approval, and happiness of our clients. And aims to create cutting-edge solutions that are pushing the boundaries of what’s thought o be possible in the mobile application space.

the mobile application space.

And for those who may be unaware, this Clutch.co accolade is only one in a series of major accolades awarded to Dogtown Media such as Top 2021 B2B Leader in Artificial Intelligence for Robotics, a top 2020 Service Provider, and the 27th Best B2B Service Provider in the World in 2019. All of these great accolades point to the dedication to craft and customer, and only scratch the surface of their long laundry list of accolades from Clutch and other prominent rating agencies in the mobile app space. 

“This recognition feels surreal and we are lost for words”, notes founder Marc Fischer. “We feel truly honored to be recognized by such a prestigious rating firm, and hope to continue to provide high-quality, meaningful applications for our clients today and far into the future. “

Here are some of the quotes that stood out most to us:

Here are some of the quotes that stood out most to us:

“They were an effective team, met deadlines, and created a great end product.“. — Director, Risk Comm Lab, Temple University

“They built an intuitive and simple design, and the team works quickly to address bugs and solve problems.”— Senior Ops Manager, Hospital Innovation Lab

Let’s build something amazing together! Connect with us and get a free tech consultation.

In late 2020, Alphabet – the parent company of Google – solved one of biology’s most challenging problems with the help of AI – predicting the structure of proteins. Alphabet’s DeepMind – a branch of Alphabet dedicated to the development and progress of AI – built AlphaFold, an AI designed specifically for this task and to everyone’s surprise…it worked.

Alphabet’s attempt to develop an AI that could predict protein structures was hugely successful when AlphaFold won a biennial protein-predicting challenge called CASP; something that hasn’t happened before in the history of mankind. Founder of the competition, John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland was astounded by the results noting “It was the first time a serious scientific problem had been solved by AI.”

Today, being able to predict protein structures in a repeatable verifiable method will undoubtedly accelerate the development of drugs and vaccines, reshape how organizations engage artificial intelligence app development and provide key insight into how diseases work, all thanks to AI.

AI and the Fight Against Chagas and Leishmaniasis

Flash forward 9 months, Alphabet’s DeepMind is on the hunt for another biological breakthrough, this time targeting some of the world’s most challenging diseases Chagas and Leishmaniasis. Chagas and Leishmaniasis are two of the world’s deadliest parasitic diseases transmitted by hosts known as assassin bugs. These two diseases alone are known to affect up to 23 million people worldwide.

The Challenges Associated with Deadly Parasitic Diseases

Unfortunately, today’s drugs and therapeutics are widely ineffective at treating both of these diseases and even worse “patients affected by neglected diseases like Leishmaniasis and Chagas disease rely on outdated treatments that are sometimes toxic, have serious side-effects, and are often not fit for purpose,” London-based Alphabet-owned lab known as Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative lead Ben Perry said.

For those affected, Chegas and Leishmaniasis can produce flu-like symptoms, rash, loss of appetite, Diarrhea, vomiting and in extreme cases without medical attention, death or permanent health complications. Understandably with 23 million people affected each year, primarily in underserved and neglected communities around the world, a more advanced medication or therapeutic to treat these parasitic diseases could be a game changer.

AI and the Future of Medicine

Now, after the massive scientific discovery made by AlphaFold related to predicting protein structures in late 2020, DeepMind may have the needed key to providing new advanced medication and therapeutics to fight changas and Leishmaniasis. Many diseases including these two deadly parasitic diseases are linked to the roles of proteins in catalysing chemical reactions and fighting diseases. By being able to predict and understand protein structures – specifically related to these parasitic diseases – DeepMind’s Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative now has the insight to provide medication or even a cure for these diseases. And AI isn’t only accelerating discovery in the world of biology and protein structures.

Just this week a new AI designed by the UAE has been proven to improve breast cancer detection, avoid unnecessary biopsies, and improve patient experience. The AI known as Mammography Intelligent Assessment (Mia) is the first AI-enabled monogram reader for breast cancer screening that is available commercially. By training the advanced AI Mia with millions of mammogram images, Mia is now producing mammogram readings that are as effective as a mammogram reading delivered by a consulting radiologist. Also Los Angeles-based UCLA’s Deepcell looks to build on these advances in AI-driven medical diagnostics to expand cell morphology to identify and sort cancer cells from clinical cytology cells.

Of course, this has far reaching implications for the medical industry, medical personnel and radiologists. Will AI augment how Radiologists diagnose and offer medical services, or will AI offer a low-cost alternative to diagnostics?

As AI continues to uncover the answers to biology’s biggest mysteries, what can we expect for the future? Could AI tackle some of mankind’s most challenging medical challenges such as cancer, aging or vaccines for tomorrow’s novel virus? It seems that only AI will be able to provide the answer to that question. With AI sweeping the competition at CASP and cracking the code of Leishmaniasis and Chagas, we are optimistic that we will continue to see massive medical and biological breakthroughs in the near future.

The goal of robotics is to develop and construct meaningful machines that will support and help human processes. The multidisciplinary field fuses technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning together to develop innovative solutions.

Dogtown Media is Los Angeles’ leading robotics company, working with enterprises and organizations to help their businesses. Our team prides itself on the satisfaction, approval, and happiness of our clients. We want to create cutting-edge solutions to solve simple frustrations and tackle business hurdles.

Just recently, Dogtown Media was hailed as a top agency on Clutch for its excellence in AI for robotics. If you’re not familiar, Clutch is a B2B review platform based in Washington, DC. The site is well respected in the space for its commitment to providing data-driven content and verifying client reviews.

This recognition feels surreal and we are lost for words. Our team wants to send its sincerest thanks to Clutch for this award. We believe that this award is a great sign for our 2021 run, and we are looking forward to a prosperous year. 

 We know that this recognition was made possible thanks to our clients’ amazing feedback. We owe this success to our clients especially those who left us their review on Clutch. 

Here are some of the quotes that stood out most to us:

“They’re a small shop that’s motivated and offers a comprehensive list of services and capabilities. They’re accountable and willing to work by our side to make the best product possible. The entire team is professional and eager to solve our problems.” — Founder, Mobile Sales Training Company

“Dogtown Media developed a solution for a project considered impossible to do in the tech world. They’ve taken every goal we’ve had and delivered above and beyond our expectations, beating our requirement of achieving a 50% accuracy rating on visual search capabilities with a software that is over 90% accurate.” — CTO, Innovengine

Let’s build something amazing together! Connect with us and get a free tech consultation.

We’ve barely just begun 2021, but it’s already shaping up to be an amazing year for Dogtown Media. We were recently featured as a top machine learning developer by Techreviewer.co! Thanks so much to our clients, team, and community for your continued support — you’re the ones who make this possible.

Techreviewer is a trusted B2B information platform that regularly conducts market research across numerous sectors, such as development, design, and marketing. Its meticulous methodology quickly helps companies identify high-quality services for a variety of complex technical tasks. Whether you’re searching for experts in AI app development, the Internet of Things, or business analysis, Techreviewer’s analysts can expedite the process of finding the best technology partner for your business needs.

For Techreviewer’s list of 2021’s top machine learning companies, the review hub evaluated each contender by examining its demonstrated expertise, experience, quality of services, and reliability to deliver products that went above and beyond clients’ requirements. That last component was especially crucial in elucidating the top players in this sector; the product must leverage key aspects of machine learning to help transform a client’s digital presence.

Over 500 companies were considered for this prestigious award. We’re extremely proud to be able to say that we made the cut after quite a few time-intensive assessments!

Besides being recognized as one of the best machine learning app developers of 2021, we’re also grateful to have been featured as one of 2021’s best iPhone app developers as well as a top mobile app developer in Los Angeles by Digital.com!

With this award, we couldn’t be more excited to see what else is in store for our company in the new year! Thanks to Techreviewer for recognizing our hard work. And thanks again to our clients, team, and community — we couldn’t have done this without you!

About TechReviewer.co

Techreviewer a trusted analytical hub that carries out studies and compiles the lists of top development, design and marketing companies. The platform helps to find the best companies that provide high-quality IT services for technical support, development, system integration, AI, Big Data, and business analysis. As a result of objective market analysis, the Techreviewer platform determines the most successful and reliable IT companies and makes top ratings for each of the service categories. Techreviewer’s ranking lists help organizations select the right technology partner for their business needs.

The healthcare industry is embracing emerging technologies at an unprecedented rate. Consequently, it’s an exciting time for medical app developers, investors, physicians, and patients. But which technologies should you keep a close eye on? Here are the advancements you can expect to see in the next few years.

1. Holistic Cloud Integration

The collection of digital data is obviously vital to the advancement of modern healthcare. But how you share this information is perhaps more important to the success of your endeavors.

More than 90% of medical institutions are hosting applications through the cloud. But this usage of the cloud is fragmented. Look around and you’ll find that health organizations are applying the cloud in data hosting, clinical apps, and backing up their systems. But keeping these discrete initiatives separate forms silos, which in turn limits the potential functionality of the data.

Cloud integration enables healthcare facilities to open up their silos and connect the dots in their data. Tom Lawry, Microsoft’s Director for AI in Health and Life Sciences, thinks this will eventually transform the medical field. “The transformation that’s brought about by the cloud and bringing that data together allows for all kinds of interesting things,” he says. “That to us is the number one transformational aspect going forward for the next few years.”

2. Better Infrastructure = Accessible Healthcare

COVID-19 has shined a light on how essential telehealth and remote patient monitoring are, especially for those with chronic health conditions. And for many people in the United States, these avenues of medicine are often the most convenient and practical to use.

“A majority of this country is still rural,” explains Rhonda Collins, the Chief Nursing Officer at Vocera. Collins is also the Founder of the American Nurse Project. “So, we need to rely on technology to fill gaps in human connections in healthcare-telehealth will be more important going forward, as infrastructure and technology continue to improve.”

Before telehealth came along, it could be difficult to find proper treatment for a malady if you weren’t living in a substantially populated area like New York City or Los Angeles. This conundrum becomes a much more grave matter when you consider that 50% of US counties contain people that have high chronic disease occurrences and a great need for better broadband connectivity. That’s equitable to over 36 million people.

Poor internet connectivity undoubtedly makes remote consultations with doctors extremely difficult. But Collins believes the situation is improving. Eventually, it will become readily apparent to all that telehealth technology will be an invaluable tool for those living in remote or rural regions. But there’s still some work to be done.

An August 2018 Healthline survey found that 46% of Medicare Advantage members were not sure if telehealth was a viable option for them. If that wasn’t troubling enough, 37% of the survey respondents believed it wasn’t available for them, even though it was.

To make this issue worse, numerous hospitals are still contending with inconsistent Wi-Fi and cellular service. In turn, this impedes telehealth services. “These basic issues make it very difficult to bring technology in to provide extraordinary care and connectivity to all patients everywhere,” says Collins. “Infrastructure upgrades are a must, and that should be the focus of many hospitals, so they can leverage great technologies that improve the lives of patients and clinicians alike.”

We have no doubt that these infrastructure upgrades will arrive with time. As noted before, COVID-19 has accelerated our usage of telehealth offerings. Let’s hope that these services become even more ubiquitous in the near future.

3. Accelerated AI Adoption

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has been a game-changer for several industries, and healthcare is no exception. But all of the use cases we’ve seen so far for this field will pale in comparison to what’s to come.

A July 2018 survey of 200 medical professionals by Intel found 37% of participants to be applying AI in limited ways. 54% of them believed that AI will see widespread adoption by 2023. For John Doyle, the Director of Global Business Strategy for Microsoft Healthcare, this adoption translates to AI affecting all aspects of a medical institution’s workflow.

Doyle believes that medical image analysis, dataset interpretation, clinical workflows, and real-time insights from medical sensor data name just a few factors that will be impacted by AI. As a result, it’s safe to assume that AI will disrupt how healthcare providers engage with patients and streamline various complicated processes.

4. Consumer-Centric Workflows

Over the next decade, Collins hopes that healthcare will adopt more technologies that the average consumer is accustomed to.

Today, a hospital employee can make dinner reservations, converse with friends, and purchase event tickets from their phones, all in just 15 minutes before their shift. But the technology landscape of their workplace is a stark contrast. Collins fears that this difference could deter younger generations from working in the field.

“When millennials go to work at a hospital, we are asking doctors, nurses and care teams to step back 20 years and use landline phones, fax machines, pagers, and overhead calls — all of which downgrade and add complexity to our millennial workforce,” Collins explains. “… As younger people continue to enter the workforce, many hospitals will be forced to modernize.”

We don’t know about you, but the thought of relying on fax machines for medical work today frightens us! Here’s hoping that Collins’ predictions come true sooner rather than later.

5. More Personalized Medical Care

Emerging technologies like machine learning, AI, and blockchain are destined to augment the abilities of clinicians in the next 10 years. According to Dr. Anil Jain, the VP and Chief Health Information Officer of IBM Watson Health, this will lead to more personalized specialized care for patients.

Jain says, “The biggest thing is going to be our ability to use these advanced technology enablers to get much better at doing personalized medicine and personalized healthcare with our patients.” Leveraging these technological capabilities on the back-end will enable providers to seamlessly and swiftly account for crucial data such as genomic profiles and social determinants of health.

According to Jain, more personalized treatment options will likely increase care plan adherence, especially for those suffering from chronic conditions. It will also cut out the back-and-forth usually involved in evidence-based approaches; physicians will likely see higher success rates in the first set of treatments offered.

What Medical Tech Excites You?

We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief glimpse into the future of healthcare technology! In truth, this list only scratches the surface of the myriad changes that technology will bring to the field of medicine.

What technological advancements are you excited to see in healthcare? Which developments should be covered in a future article of ours? As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

As we roll into the 2020s, we’re looking forward to how technology is going to vastly improve healthcare, and more specifically, the patient experience. Before the turn of the decade, we saw several new tech trends that will be implemented in the coming years. In this first part of our healthcare tech trends series, we’ll cover how artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), electronic health records (EHRs), 5G, blockchain, and chatbots will transform our medical experiences — and unlock a healthier future for us all.

The Promise of AI and ML

The rapid development of AI and ML are allowing us to apply these innovative emerging technologies to healthcare already; every year, the impact these two fields are making on healthcare grows larger. From automating patient follow-up and appointment-setting to enabling a robot to assist patients, AI has the potential to change and save lives.

Experts predict that consumers will eventually buy the latest AI-enabled healthcare apps to monitor and optimize their health without having to visit a doctor’s office.

But patients aren’t the only benefactors of AI in healthcare: therapists can use clinical AI robots to administer cognitive behavioral therapy, radiologists can employ AI to help them detect or dismiss health conditions, and robots can reduce paperwork for administrators. When providers and administrators experience time savings, patients wait less, services cost less, and diagnoses can become more accurate.

Improving EHRs

Patient medical records are currently in a disarray. In the US, if you move out of state, there’s a good chance that your new provider will be using a different EHR system than your previous provider.

These records come in a wide variety of forms that contain different facets of information. For example, EHRs contain general patient information, treatment plans, diagnoses, progress notes, surgery results, lab results, outcomes, and much more. The information could be attached as audio, video, or a piece of paper.

In the 2020s, experts want to see providers move to common EHRs so patients can seamlessly take their information to another doctor’s office. For medical professionals, EHRs save tons of time by allowing the provider to skip the usual basic questions and dig into other areas that may have been neglected in the past.

Patients can be reached through text and email without a receptionist having to lift a finger. And best of all, EHRs can’t get lost, burned, or stolen by a malicious party. They’re built with enhanced levels of cybersecurity and access levels to prevent data theft.

Seamless 5G Connectivity

5G has only been implemented in a few select cities like Los Angeles, so we haven’t experienced the true benefits of this cellular technology within our healthcare system yet. But when it becomes more widespread, we’re going to see 5G become a turning point for healthcare IT infrastructure. Most people’s experience with hospital Wi-Fi is that it’s either non-existent or mind-numbingly slow.

With 5G, a hospital can truly become connected. Remotely monitoring patients in real-time, paging doctors immediately when something doesn’t look right, and faster loading speeds for those huge medical image files are some of the first improvements 5G will bring.

Down the line, ambulances en-route can send the emergency room staff the patient’s EHR without any latency issues, families can monitor their loved ones without the risk of contaminating their hospital room, and a concierge robot can keep you posted about your loved ones’ vitals, rather than you having to bug a very busy nurse.

Imagine using a 5G network to remotely train physicians for surgery and administration, a remote surgery taking place internationally on a 5G network, and AI working in real-time to analyze patients across the entire hospital.

It’s difficult to predict exactly how we’ll use 5G over the next decade, but experts expect 5G to completely transform several aspects of the patient experience.

Implementing Blockchain

Blockchain is a trendy technology that many people dismissed as an overhyped paradigm that didn’t hold much potential for medical applications. But because blockchains have built-in anonymity and security, it turns out that it’s actually the perfect technology to implement in healthcare.

Using blockchain to secure EHRs would create records of who accessed which record at what time. It anonymizes EHRs so that hackers can’t steal personal or identifiable information using cryptography.

One of blockchain’s best features is that peer networks copy blockchains in real-time, so if the original blockchain was ever corrupted, deleted, or stolen, there are multiple copies of the blockchain living on different networks that hold the truth.

Intuitive, Personable Chatbots

Chatbots are already improving by the day. Whereas we used to give a chatbot our email address so a human could contact us, they’re now coded and routinely optimized with answers to common questions and issues.

Chatbots in the healthcare industry can provide a great source of comfort and information to patients and their families. They offer empathy and emotional support to patients. Patient-only chatbots track the patient’s health, connect the patient to clinicians for diagnosis and treatment options, and analyze the patient’s data. Other chatbots help rural patients deal with emergency situations and simpler medical issues with a walk-through-style conversation.

Revolutionizing the Healthcare Game

Healthcare is already a $200 billion industry. But the technologies we’ve discussed will expand the industry’s worth exponentially over the next few years.

In our next post, we’ll cover how computer vision and image recognition, wearables, virtual reality, telemedicine, and voice search are going to impact medicine and the patient experience in the 2020s. So stay tuned!

Have you seen any of these technologies implemented in a cool way at your doctor’s office or at your local hospital? Let us know in the comments below!

Robotic medicine artificial intelligence concept. Robot doctor with stethoscope, syringe blood test. Blue background. empty space for text.

There are many ways humanity is mobilizing to fight against the COVID-19 crisis. While most of us can’t help out at the hospital as a nurse or doctor, we can sew masks, use our 3D printers to make supplementary PPE, and create web and mobile resources to help others cope.

Luckily, we’re also receiving a helping hand from technology. It turns out that robots are doing their fair share of aid: more than two dozen types of robots have been working to support public health and safety by working inside and outside of hospitals, automating testing, and helping humans slowly return to normal life again.

The Newest Essential Workers

If you’ve been to a hospital lately, you might have seen a cylindrical robot wheeling around the ICU area. This automaton allows healthcare workers to take the patient’s temperature, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure remotely. It also helps the patient (especially those on ventilators) maintain their breathing in a sterile and sanitized room.

But this isn’t the only robot concerned with cleanliness. Many medical facilities are also employing large robots equipped with ultraviolet light; they roam the hallways, rotating vertically to disinfect everything they pass by.

Robots are also helping to attend to those who are quarantined. Cart-like automatons are being used to deliver food to people confined to hotel rooms during this crisis. And quadcopter drones are scurrying back and forth, bringing test samples to labs — and also taking photos of anyone violating shelter-in-place restrictions.

These incredibly diverse robots are providing much-needed help. In a global disaster such as this one, we would be remiss to not rely on robots to relieve as many frontline workers as possible. This includes taking care of sanitization, hourly vital measurements, resource delivery, and even a few duties for local police departments.

A Global Effort

Roboticists at the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and Texas A&M University researched over 120 ways that robots are helping 21 countries during this pandemic. They concluded that aerial and ground robots are indispensable in managing the COVID-19 crisis.

Medic robots holds a tubes with a stick for scraping PCR and blood test. Abstract diagnostic room, medical equipment: table, test tubes blood samples on blue background. copy space

Besides disinfecting hospital rooms and hallways, robots are also delivering food and prescriptions to patients. Some are even handling the extra paperwork and data entry that comes along with a surge in patients.

Outside of many hospitals, sanitizing robots are hard at work spraying disinfectant in public areas. Besides identifying people violating their local stay-at-home orders, drones are being used to create thermal images to find people with fevers and remind people to stay more than six feet apart. One country is even using a robot to roll through crowds, with audio advising people about the virus and social distancing.

For those who must keep working but cannot work from home from a computer all day, robots are helping them keep up business as usual. At a new hospital in China, construction workers worked through the night as drones carried the lighting around the hospital.

Realtors are using robots to teleconference with video during property tours without leaving their homes. Japanese students “attended” graduation with robots walking the stage. And in Cyprus, Greece, a man used his drone to walk his dog so he wouldn’t have to violate the shelter-in-place restrictions.

A Helping Hand, Not a Replacement

Although some of the robots in use are autonomous, that is, developed with AI, there is zero indication that they are taking over human jobs. Instead of displacing workers, robots are aiding them in a myriad of ways.

Robots work faster than most humans, saving time and effort that can be used more productively elsewhere. Aside from efficiency, the usage of robots also helps save vital personal protective equipment (PPE).

All around the world, robots are undertaking tasks that humans could not do safely during this time. This also prevents workers from being exposed to the virus, which is going to save countless lives.

Off-the-Shelf Instead of Cutting-Edge

It’s important to note that, while many startups and research labs are innovating during this time and developing medical robots, these new robots are highly unlikely to make any sort of impact now. Most medical facilities are choosing to rely on tried-and-tested automatons rather than new prototypes.

Most often, robots used in an emergency, especially those making a major difference, were already in common use before the disaster occurred. One reason is that healthcare workers (and other frontline workers) are way too inundated with smaller details during a disaster to spend any time learning or training on a new machine.

Robots already in use can be repurposed in the event of a disaster: agriculture drones, ones that spray pesticides over many acres of farmland, are being used in India and China to spray disinfectant over large urban areas.

Newer iterations of robots will certainly be useful in future pandemics. Which leads us to our next thought: We mustn’t pause innovation when humanity recovers from this pandemic.

Robots Can Help Us With Future Crises

From Los Angeles to Beijing, COVID-19 has brought the world in a standstill. It’s inspiring to see how robots are being used to help humans handle this pandemic better. We hope that the benefits these automatons have brought spur new innovation in this field. It’s clear that robots hold vast potential to help out in crises like this pandemic.

What developments would you like to see in the field of robotics? Did you hear about any other examples of robots helping out during the COVID-19 crisis? As always, feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

In fact, lack of cybersecurity in IoT systems is actually hindering the field from reaching its full potential. To make matters worse, security features for IoT applications can vary from developer to developer. It, unfortunately, isn’t uncommon for security to take a backseat in the development process until the end, when there’s no budget or time left to implement a proper solution.

But this approach isn’t cutting it. In IoT applications, it’s not enough to create a set-it-and-forget-it security layer; IoT isn’t like a PC or any previous technology we’ve encountered before. Because there are so many sensors, devices, and a cloud component, it takes a lot of thought and planning to create a robust, secure IoT system.

Could AI help solve this conundrum before it’s too late? The short answer is yes and no. The long answer? Keep reading.

The Bright Side: Helpful AI

Right now, AI development within IoT applications is limited to data analysis, predictive analytics, and generating notifications for a human to take a closer look. It does very well in this area, and there’s still a lot to learn and apply. But even this application results in a lot of false positives for humans to sift through manually. In this case, applying AI to assist with IoT cybersecurity could cause more issues than it helps solve.

Is it possible for AI to train on known patterns of security attacks and breaches? Yes, but we would have to put the IoT system itself through the attacks multiple times so the AI can learn each nuance properly. And when hackers change up their methods and patterns, we’ll have to ensure our AI-enhanced cybersecurity protocols are trained on these changes immediately. Otherwise, this type of AI application can quickly make itself become obsolete and useless.

Whereas a company may have full-time dedicated cybersecurity and IT teams, it would also be imperative that they employ a full-time team of ethical hackers to constantly come up with new ways to breach their company’s security protocols. Even then, it’s not a 100% guarantee that an IoT system is fully secured against any type of hacking attempt.

One major hurdle is the lack of training data available for these breaches; companies who’ve been breached in the past are not likely to openly give out details of how and why their security systems were breached. Because of the nature of the Internet, anyone could use this information maliciously against other companies or against the same company again.

And more importantly, releasing information about a breach implicates personal and sensitive data that could upset customers.

The Dark Side: Malicious AI

AI is what you make it. If you’re developing AI with malicious intent, it can certainly be used to bring down a business’s operations for a few days or leak private data into the open waters of the Internet.

And as hackers get smarter and more creative with the increasing number of tools at their disposal, AI will be used to help breaches successfully occur, rather than help prevent them. This type of AI has already been lovingly named by experts as “enemy-AI”.

Enemy-AI is arguably easier to develop, train (it’ll take any training data it can get because any information can help it facilitate a security breach), and apply to attacks, especially when compared to using AI as a defense mechanism.

When we discussed companies not releasing breach information to the public, we see that with enemy-AI, there is no ethical standpoint. With hackers, we must assume that they have no morals or ethics that they follow; if something can yield losses for a company, we must assume that hackers find that information valuable as a result.

Which Will Take the Cake?

The cynic in us believes the malicious AI can easily win over the defense AI. But there is hope yet because it’s likely that neither “side” will ever truly win. There is a ton of value in using AI for IoT security. As far as what this value is used for depends on who gets to it first and who implements it best.

Ultimately, developers must prioritize security as a main part of IoT systems development. At our Los Angeles-based mobile app development studio, we’re planning for security layers in our applications from Day 1; we believe cybersecurity is so important to connected devices and systems that our own CTO is an ethical hacker!

Although AI has limitless potential for every industry today, we mustn’t expect it to do all of the heavy lifting, especially in the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity. AI is a tool that imperfectly does what we tell it to do, and we mustn’t expect anything more from it — at least for now.